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FUELING
By Douglas Wilson
Know Your FBO Point of Sale Systems Options
Consider your needs when picking a POS system for your FBO.
Though numbers of Fixed Base Operations (FBOs) in business today vary from year to year, it is a commonly held belief in the industry there are approximately 3,000 FBOs in the United States. While still a close approximation, the devil of course is in the details. To correctly identify the number of FBOs, one must define what an FBO actually is today.
For decades following the passage of the Air Commerce Act in 1926, an FBO was often a full service business out of necessity, as opposed to Minimum Standards. FBOs offered a host of complementary services, such as aircraft refueling and line services, storage, maintenance, charter, sales and flight training. Today, through a variety of now well-documented market forces and consolidation, many FBOs offer a more limited menu of services, such as aircraft refueling and line services, and aircraft storage. Using that latter definition and using a publically available flight planning database, there are some 2,527 FBOs selling Jet fuel in the United States, spread out over 2,191 airports as of September of 2017.
Despite what one industry group may think, FBOs are for profit enterprises. They pay significant leasehold fees, flowage fees and concession fees to operate at airports across the country. In turn, they charge their customers for goods and services. While it doesn't take a Keynesian economist to understand the transactional relationship between business
38 airportbusiness May 2018